Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring #4

Patrick Horvath's woodland noir continues with this fourth installment of Rite of Spring, and the cover sets a quietly unsettling tone. A duck in a baseball cap and safety vest — holding what appears to be a clipboard or tool — stands framed in an eerie diamond of crackling lightning at the front door of a suburban home, flanked by two anthropomorphic mice: an older female figure with a cane on the left and a younger one in a red hoodie on the right. The everyday suburban setting contrasted with that charged, foreboding energy is exactly the kind of understated dread this series does so well.